How-To Geek

Apple Music has quietly become the better music streaming service—it’s more affordable than Spotify and offers higher quality audio than Spotify. That said, I’ve been using Spotify for ten years, collecting songs and building personalized playlists, and I wasn’t keen on throwing all of that away just to move to Apple Music.

Gemini regularly impresses me by carrying out complex, multifaceted requests. That’s why it’s so infuriating when it fails spectacularly at the most basic tasks—things Google Assistant could handle with ease. There’s a simple solution to this problem: make Gemini dumber.

Toys help shape who we are in our childhood, but at times, the tales we engage in are big enough to reach the silver screen. For decades, toy manufacturers have used movies to expand upon the world of their products. While many of these can be seen as cynical cash-ins, there is no shortage of examples that manage to capture the hearts and minds of both the young and old.

Toys help shape who we are in our childhood, but at times, the tales we engage in are big enough to reach the silver screen. For decades, toy manufacturers have used movies to expand upon the world of their products. While many of these can be seen as cynical cash-ins, there is no shortage of examples that manage to capture the hearts and minds of both the young and old.

Are your Plex streams slow or stuttery? Chances are it's not your Plex server at all, and it's likely your home network. Here are a few things to check before you go diving into configuration and settings pages, because you probably don't even need to check there.

Home Assistant is incredibly powerful, and the core features allow you to do an enormous amount with your smart home devices. It's not perfect, however, and there are some things that aren't possible with the default features. There's a very useful custom integration that lets it do even more.

For years, I kept self-hosting in the “sounds cool, but not for me” category. I wasn’t into Linux or servers, and I assumed it required too much time and too much knowledge just to get started.

If you have an Android phone, you probably use Google Wallet or Samsung Wallet. As a long-time Galaxy user, I've used Samsung Wallet (formerly Samsung Pay) for more than a decade to take advantage of all its conveniences. But that doesn't mean I don't use Google's version too. I actually use both apps because they work better together.

Picking a cordless tool brand feels like it should be simple until you realize the battery you buy first decides everything that comes after it. I learned that the hard way when I priced out a basic kit and saw the gap between Milwaukee and Ryobi up close. Both brands come from the same parent company, but they're built for completely different users and budgets.

AI doesn't always have to rely on the cloud. You can use local LLMs for a lot and give them access to information from the internet without having to expose them outside your home network. I built an AI-generated morning news briefing using a local LLM that never touches the cloud.

Whether you buy expensive SSDs or choose more affordable models (which are also quite expensive right now, let's be real), you probably think that nothing is safer than a new SSD. As in, at no point during the SSD's lifespan will your files be safer than right now, when you just bought it.

Technically, an operating system is only the software you need to run your computer and install software that you can use, but Microsoft has been bundling apps with Windows from the start.

The online video world is always chasing new trends, and now it’s all about short-form content. These short, scrollable feed-based videos are the most effective way to grow an audience, but producing them is surprisingly costly and time-consuming.

Claude users often fall into two camps: those who use it as a chatbot, and those who use it for coding. Claude Cowork can easily end up getting overlooked by both camps. There are plenty of ways you can use Claude Cowork that aren't for coding or typical chatbot conversations.

While some Linux distros have stood the test of time, others have fallen by the wayside, remembered only by their users.

Home Assistant is powerful smart home software that's packed with a huge number of features. There's so much it can do, and so much that you can do with it, that sometimes you might need a little guidance, help, or inspiration. There are some great Home Assistant resources available that you can turn to.

I'm happy to see that people are apparently getting back on the physical media wagon. By some miracle, DVDs and Blu-ray discs have remained in production and are still readily available, but for a while it seemed like the fervor for streaming might kill off physical media for good.

The traditional Linux tools like nano, man, cat, cd, ls etc. are almost four decades old now. They come from a time when computers had black-and-white screens and less computing power than your phone.

It's been almost two years since House of the Dragon season 2 ended on a cliffhanger. Tonight, we get answers in theHouse of the Dragon season 3 premiere, which airs at 9 p.m. ET/PT on HBO and streams on HBO Max.

Vibe coding—despite huge improvements over the last two years—has always been hit-and-miss, with emphasis on "miss" if you're not very careful about how you use it. Fable 5—for the brief time it was available—felt like it finally changed that.